We got up to our first full day in Tanzania! Breakfast is served at 10am this week so me and Kelly got up and showered just a bit before that. We get meals for free through the school so we wandered down to the cafeteria and had had toast an omelet and a banana as well as some interesting instant coffee. After breakfast we decided to walk with Nick to Shop-rite. This involves going straight down Dodoma Road for maybe two three miles. (I haven’t yet taken pictures of all this because I didn’t want to appear too conspicuous.)
The road is lined with various one storey shack-like buildings that house low budget pubs or sketch kinda lookin shops and people are everywhere! There are people sitting around, people selling things, people pulling carts or shooing animals or talking in groups. And then there are the vehicles cars, bus, carts, motorcycles anything with wheels all careening down this narrow road swerving around each other horns blaring. The horn is very versatile. It can say things like “move over” “Don’t step out I will hit you” “I want to merge” “Do NOT merge” “Stop stopping” “I’m trying to get around you” etc. It can say basically anything and EVERYONE uses them excessivly.
The smells, too, can be quite overwhelming. There is a paved sunken ditch on the sides of the road and this tends to be filled with various trash (damp or burning), sometimes excrement, and very questionable looking liquids. I was very careful around those, I did NOT want to fall in.
The name for white person around here is Muzungu and every now and then people will scream it out cars at us. Touristy looking people are generally thought of as having lots of money and therefore get charged more almost everywhere. There can also be issues with pick pocketing.
Despite this the walk is actually quite safe especially when you are in a group. We got to Shop-rite which is a grocery and convenience store and looked around. We purchased some food and a few house things (even though our apartment is not ready) Here’s a kinda crappy pic. Sorry about that...I call it an apartment but it’s really more of a house. We're not sure which one will be ours but they're all the same anyway.
And then we walked back (I used the bags that Deb and Gram gave me and they were fabulous!) On the way back, we accidentally saw a naked man washing in one of the culverts. Whoops!
We snagged some lunch at the cafeteria. (Beans and rice and bbq) and chatted with the school accountant for a while. (We’ve met a whole bunch of new people but it would be exhausting to catalogue them here. So you’ll just have to meet them as they come up in the narrative.)
Then we wandered around campus taking some pictures...
I'm pretty sure these are dangerous snake holes!
There are two pools next to each other. This is the big one. (hopefully we'll be paying water polo in this later in the year.)
before heading over to the Coffee Lodge to hang out and use the internet.
We figured out some phrases in Swahili. What is your name? (Jina lako ni nani?) My name is… (Jina langu ni…) I like Tanzania. (Nina pendi Tanzania) Bye.(Kwaheri) And tested them out on the Coffee Lodge guards and the guards at our gate; they were all delighted. And really wanted to help us with some more phrases.
Later, Monica and Jose made us dinner and we all (including Heather and Maria) ate on the front porch. Afterwards Kelly and I went to hang out at Maria and Heather’s house. The power was out so we ended up chatting by candlelight (which I rather liked)
An aside about the power situation; Tanzania has really unreliable power. It goes on and off all day and all night. The other night in the Coffee Lodge the power went out and it took a few minutes for the generator to kick on. The school has generators too, but we only use them at certain times. They are on from 630am to 8am so that teachers can get up and shower and cook if they want to. It is on for the school day naturally. And then after school gets out it’s only on from 7pm to 9pm. You may get electricity at other times but it’s not guaranteed and often patchy. The wireless internet also turns off when the power is off. There is one exception to the power rule. There is a second generator for the computer lad that runs basically all the time. This way we at least have the ability to lesson plan at any time of the day or night. It can be a bit of a nuisance sometimes but it’s generally not too bad.
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